If you look around conference rooms, corporate boardrooms, and leadership teams, it’s clear that despite continued lip service to diversity, most businesses today still prefer the status quo when it comes to senior leadership roles. Much of this can be traced back to comfort level: SHAMBAUGH has found that people often feel safer when surrounded by those who are like-minded.

Some of the aversion to inclusion can also be found in a mentality of, “It doesn’t appear to be broken, so why fix it?” Some leaders may feel that if their profit lines are currently working, there’s no need to change what they’re doing at the leadership level. The problem with this assumption, though, is that frameworks quickly become outdated. The thinking styles that got you where you are today won’t get you where you’re trying to go in the future.